* I'm using "corporate sell outs" as a joke. If rapists and murders deserve council then so do evil corporations.

But seriously what do people who have no interest in doing corporate law permanently do. Being junior enlisted with wife in grad school full time I can't imagine turning down a six figure starting salary, but I have simply no desire to do that permanently. So what do social minded people with an interest in either government or public interest wok do after a few years in big law?

Does big law experience help at all with landing a job I'd be passionate about?

How about pro bono work, do most companies allow you to do pro bono work you interested in or do they assign work?

I love how you assume that people who do corporate work cannot be socially minded, as if the two were somehow mutually exclusive.

I would ask this question: why are you going to work at a firm in the first place? Plus, if you can deal with the shit that the military throws your way then you should be able to handle firm life easily.

rvadog wrote:* I'm using "corporate sell outs" as a joke. If rapists and murders deserve council then so do evil corporations.

But seriously what do people who have no interest in doing corporate law permanently do. Being junior enlisted with wife in grad school full time I can't imagine turning down a six figure starting salary, but I have simply no desire to do that permanently. So what do social minded people with an interest in either government or public interest wok do after a few years in big law?

Does big law experience help at all with landing a job I'd be passionate about?

How about pro bono work, do most companies allow you to do pro bono work you interested in or do they assign work?

Feel free to correct me if I have some wrong ideas.

They go work for the government or in public interest?

More serious answer (or just longer), a lot of government/PI employers don't have the resources to train new attorneys, so prefer to hire people who already have experience. So if you can use your time in biglaw to acquire relevant skills (for example, get as much actual hands-on litigation experience as you can, work on pertinent pro bono cases), you can make yourself into an attractive candidate for other positions.

There are many ways that people can do socially progressive legal work, and there are many civil rights firms and public interest organizations that do hire people straight out of lawschool. The drawback of virtually all of these opportunities, though, is that they typically pay in the range of 30-60k a year, which many people find unsatisfying given their enormous school debts. Because of this, it has become increasingly common to work biglaw for a few years if you have the grades, then lateral into public interest work.

The growth of the practice of starting in biglaw before moving into public interest can certainly be seen as unfortunate. For one thing, it accentuates the issue of how prohibitive legal education costs have become. If what we cherish most about the legal profession is its power to advance and protect the public good, then why do we have a legal education system that basically coerces students that are passionate about doing public interest work to forego doing so at the beginning of their careers? It really is a shame what a desperate financial situation a student usually must put him or herself in when he or she chooses to start off in public interest. It should be noted, of course, that the dire financial consequences of a legal education is not a problem unique to public interest.

All of that said, drawing a line between corporations and socially minded work is grossly over-simplistic. There is some truth to the famous quote from Nicholas Butler, an early president of Columbia University, "The limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times; even steam and electricity would be reduced to comparative impotence without it." Corporations and what motivates them absolutely lead to a lot of things that everyone should consider evil, but it's naieve to not see that the sword has two edges and that there are very good arguments that the good far outweighs the bad. Even ignoring everything that can be said about research and development, there are more subtle things to be pointed out, like the fact that many public interest organizations are only viable because of financial services, methods of management, legal structure, business organization, etc. that owe their existence to corporations. Whether the good really does outweigh the bad could be argued to the point of ad nauseum, and I could understand people taking polar opposite positions on the issue, but I think that there's enough gray area that we should all be able to agree that you can't draw the clear conclusion that someone who is doing corporate work is doing socially harmful work. Also, I think it's worth appreciating that there's a lot of really bland and innocuous biglaw work out there, and not all biglaw clients are corporations.